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On Questioning the Questionnaire: Research Experiences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Susan Eckstein
Susan Eckstein*
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Social scientists generally present the conclusions of their studies without describing how their ideas may have changed in the course of doing research. They also rarely discuss the impact they have on the persons they study or the ethical problems of research. I will address both of these issues, focusing on my experiences doing research on Mexican urban poor. In addition, I will describe how and why my conceptual framework changed during the study and raise some general questions about the relationship between theory and methods and the types of moral dilemmas faced by researchers, who often are neither value-free nor politically neutral.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , 1979 , pp. 141 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

1.

For the results of the research, see Susan Eckstein, The Poverty of Revolution: The State and Urban Poor in Mexico (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

References

Notes

2. This hypothesis was based on the work of Karl Deutsch, “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” in Political Development and Social Change, edited by Jason Finkle and Richard Gable (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966); and Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958).

3. I derived this assumption from ethnographic accounts of ethnic “villagers” and slum dwellers in Mexico and in other countries. See Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: The Free Press, 1962); William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959) and The Children of Sanchez: An Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961).

4. William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959).

5. Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1961), pp. 225–386.

6. Such local autonomy is implicit both in the pluralist and in the elitist models of community power structure. See, for example, Robert Dahl, “A Critique of Ruling Elite Model,” American Political Science Review 52 (June 1958): 463–69; Raymond Wolfinger, “Reputation and Reality in the Study of Community Power,” in The Structure of Community Power, edited by Michael Aiken and Paul Mott (New York: Random House, 1970); Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953); and Nelson Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963). The few American social scientists, such as C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956) and G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967), who emphasize the centralization of power in the United States, concentrate on national, not local politics.

7. On the “positional” approach see Robert Schulze and Leonard Blumberg, “The Determination of Local Power Elites,” in The Structure of Community Power, edited by Aiken and Mott, and Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961).

8. See, for example, Hunter, Community Power Structure.

9. See Polsby, Community Power and Political Theory.

10. Lewis, The Children of Sanchez.

11. The concern with researchers' direct involvement in the domestic affairs of foreign countries usually centers on whether the meliorative attempts are kept within limits acceptable to the established government of the country concerned, not whether the involvement is in the best interests of the people studied. For a statement of this status-quo ethicality, see Robert Ward, “Common Problems in Field Research,” in Studying Politics Abroad: Field Research in the Developing Areas, edited by Ward (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1964).

12. Similarly, Joseph Gusfield, in “Fieldwork Reciprocities in Studying a Social Movement,” Human Organization 14 (Fall 1955): 29, describes how his association with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which he studied, conferred a definite status on the group; and David Colfax, in “Pressure toward Distortion and Involvement in Studying a Civil Rights Organization,” Human Organization 25 (Summer 1966): 140–49, notes that a civil rights group that he studied found his research “status conferring.”

13. To the extent that I had such effects I was not a neutral observer, even though I considered myself to be. While engaging in “participant observation” fieldwork I was an “outsider.” In Gans' words I was never a “real” participant. See Gans, Urban Villagers, pp. 339.